"I think every game is a universe in a way, or every
game is an expression of how the universe works, for different
cultures."
"Every game has a connection to how we conceive nature
and landscape. How we order and we structure reality."
"I believe that philosophy has to be a practice. Practical
philosophy. It’s like the way the Greeks used to solve
philosophical and mathematical problems, by walking."
"I concentrate on reality in terms of what is happening
to me and I try to revolutionize that and try to rethink
it and transform it. I try to transform reality with it’s
own rules, with the things I found there. "
"I like to make a game grow by trying to understand
the geometry of the situation."
"...Chess is a product of a culture that has a notion
of nature. Those notions of nature—in terms of how
it works, how it’s controlled—are expressed in
the games that people invent in their time."
"...My influence is more in connection with everyday
cultural objects that I am encountering and that are part
of my life."
"Ping Pond Table"—where did the idea for that work come from?
OROZCO:
The "Ping Pond Table"
is connected to this idea of a new space, a new possible space.
When you have a normal ping pong game you have a net which
is enough space between two spaces. But when you multiply
that space by four, instead of two people playing you have
four people playing in four tables. You open that space so
the net is also open. And what you have there is a new space
because it didn’t exist before. I’m thinking in
a new game when I multiply by four the knights in the chessboard
or when I made the pendulum and the billiard table. In this
case I opened the ping pong—the net, that space in between
two spaces—I opened it up. And I have a tri-dimensional
space now in-between four spaces.
That is the space that I’m interested in, the in-between
space. Even in photographs I think what is interesting is
in between the photographer and the space, which is the same
as the in-between of the photograph and the spectator. To
activate that space. To activate means to fill it with meaning
and connections so that we can think about it. We can connect
with it and make it happen as a space and time in between
things.
So in this case it’s the net, the limit and the border
between two spaces. I opened that border and it became tri-dimensional,
a space in itself. And that’s why I decided to make the
pond. I could decide to make anything I wanted. It could be
a rug or sand or nothing. But then I liked the idea because
the shape of the table has to be round. It’s round because
you have to move waiting for the bounce from three different
tables, you have to move much more than in a normal ping pong
table. I liked the idea of the pond and the lotus. If you
want to think in a metaphorical
sense of the lotus flower as the beginning of the universe,
I think you can do that because it’s a new game. It’s
a new space for a new way of playing with the universe, which
is this game. I think every game is a universe in a way, or
every game is an expression of how the universe works for
different cultures.
Ping pong is a game about the universe playing or is a game
about how the universe is so arbitrary and how it’s constant.
ART:21:
Is the lotus a symbol in this
work, or is it wrong to think of it that way—of it having
a specific cultural meaning?
OROZCO:
It’s not that it’s
wrong, it’s just that...games, because they have this
reference, are expressions of how we believe the universe
works in different cultures. We know that chess has that and
billiards has that. Ping pong has that too. Every game has
a connection to how we conceive nature and landscape. How
we order and we structure reality. In the case of the ping
pong table I decided to use the shape of the lotus flower
and the pond and to have this reference to Buddhism or Indian
culture in terms of the lotus flower as the beginning of the
universe. Just because I found it interesting. I am not religious
at all, but I like philosophy and science fiction and fiction.
I like these ideas in which we all try to explain with metaphors
and with numbers how the universe works.
And I think it’s fascinating to know all this, but also
it’s fascinating to prove it in reality, to see it in
reality. You can prove and test and witness all these theories,
all these fictions, all these metaphors—very, really
ancient—in reality everyday. You can understand why a
pond could be the beginning of the universe or the center
of the universe. I think it’s quite easy to understand
if you look at a pond with so many things happening there.
Why it’s the origin of life. It’s just like another
way of playing around with the explanation of the universe
and how it works. Like in the billiard table with a pendulum,
which is how planets move, how the planet Earth moves. And
the same in chess. So I think that it’s not just a game.
Probably they are more like philosophical games. I believe
that philosophy has to be a practice. Practical philosophy.
It’s like the way the Greeks used to solve philosophical
and mathematical problems, by walking. Not sitting. It's easier
to solve problems moving—when you walk and you talk—probably
because you have better irrigation in the brain or just because
you are breathing better. Because you are moving you have
better chances to solve complex problems. And also I think
in a way it’s an action thing. So I think philosophy
is an action, it should be. And to play the games are part
of it.
ART:21:
Do you ever use the word 'metaphysical'
to describe your interests?
OROZCO:
I never use that word so much,
metaphysical. It’s too metaphysical for me. [LAUGHS]
I avoid two words: poetic and metaphysic. I avoid those two
words because I think it’s a belief problem. I think
the poetic happens, what we call the poetic. It happens because
of the spectator, not because it is poetic. And the metaphysic
is similar. So it is an act, an act of belief or an act of
illusion
on the part of the spectator. For someone to say, "Yes,
I’m gonna do something metaphysical," or "Yes,
I’m gonna do something poetic"—it’s a
mistake. So I think if it happens, if there is something that
happens that we can call poetic and then somebody is touched
and says, "Wow, this is really poetic," it’s
because this person is open for this to happen. And the word
metaphysical, I don’t really even know what it means.
[LAUGHS] I believe in reality and I don’t know what the
metaphysical is. And I don’t claim that I understand
what reality is...
ART:21:
Can you talk about the billiards
table some more? How does the billiards table connect to your
belief in reality?
OROZCO:
I concentrate on reality in
terms of what is happening to me and I try to revolutionize
that and try to rethink it and transform it. I try to transform
reality with it’s own rules, with the things I found
there. So like the market in Brazil, I found the oranges there.
Or the "Island in an Island"—it was a bottle
with pieces of wood that was there, and I rearranged that.
I never carry anything with me.
What I like about games is that a game is a thing on it’s
own. You have a little world in this board or in this table,
designed
to perfection so you can play in a landscape. When it is a
good game it’s so passionate that you can really get
into this world and just live in it for a moment. When it
is a good game, it’s an intelligent thing and that’s
why it’s so passionate. Billiards is very intelligent.
I mean it’s a landscape, it’s mathematics, it’s
geometry, it’s physicality, it’s physics...it’s
many things. My favorite is with three balls and no pockets,
and you're trying to make a triangular connection between
the two other balls. I played a lot with that when I was a
kid. It was more popular in Mexico than pool.
One day I was in France and I saw the Foucault's Pendulum,
and as you know it’s the way that it was proved that
the earth moves. You have this pendulum hanging from very
high which is constantly moving because the earth is rotating,
and I found that fascinating. It’s a permanent motion
sculpture. It’s a science too, but at the same time you
can consider it as beautiful as...now okay, I don’t want
to say a beautiful sculpture because I think it’s much
better as an instrument for science, but anyway...I am an
artist and I look at it as a possible sculpture. So then I
decided why don’t we transform a billiard? What happens
if one of the balls in the billiard is a pendulum? I also
decided instead of having a rectangular table to have an elliptical
table or an oval table. So then we will play closer to laws
of the universe. And then when we put this hanging ball with
the oval billiard table which is called “Oval Billiard
Table with Pendulum,” you can play a game, but you add
complexity because now you have time involved. And you have
an element which is the elliptical bands. You cannot count
on them anymore.
In billiards, because it’s rectangular, you can calculate
how the ball is going to bounce. And if you know a little
bit about geometry, or just about billiards, you know how
it’s going to bounce so you can get these triangular
connections. But in this case, because it’s an elliptical
space, you are talking about the borders of the universe and
it’s always expanding. So when the ball starts to touch
the ellipses, these oval curves—it just starts to bounce
around and around and then just gets lost totally. So you
cannot count so much on the two or three times it can bounce
back. It starts to just rotate around. If you were so strong
that you can make this ball rotate, I mean have the force
to keep it moving, it will be just around the band of the
table. On the other hand, the pendulum is moving so you have
to calculate when you hit the ball. To hit the ball that is
the pendulum, you have to calculate exactly the point of connection,
but also the time of this pendulum coming back. So you have
to wait and you have to breath and see when the ball maybe
is outside of the table and then comes back. And in that specific
time you have to hit it. It’s not just that it’s
in a specific point in space, but it’s also in time in
that point that you have to hit the ball. Anyway, it’s
a totally different game and it’s more complex in many
ways.
It’s also much more boring than a normal billiard game
[LAUGHS] and also I didn’t put any rules except the basic
rules of hitting two balls with your own ball. But nevertheless
I think it can be interesting and I think also what is important
is that you can actually play. It’s built with everything
so that you can play and people play it. I play it sometimes
and the rules have to be invented because it’s a new
system, it’s a new world and with new laws. Then you
have to invent the rules. Of course, I don’t like to
invent rules, but somebody will do it if they want to make
some competition in that game. For the moment it’s just
a game to watch, I think, or to play and you watch. But I
think it’s nice to watch because it's a different kind
of magic.
ART:21:
Maria, your wife said that you
like to make rules for games. That you're always inventing
new games to play.
OROZCO:
Well I like to make new games.
I like to improvise games in situations and then I like the
rule just because the rule makes the game grow. I like to
make a game grow by trying to understand the geometry of the
situation. And then you have to make some rules and times
and scores and points and bounces, how many bounces and things
like that. So I like to do that. It’s quite silly, but
normal.
ART:21:
Can you talk about rules as they
relate to your chessboard piece "Horses Running Endlessly"?
OROZCO:
Well, the knight in chess is
very, very interesting. It’s fascinating because of how
it moves. It moves two squares and one, but in reality it’s
moving between squares. What it’s doing, that knight,
is it’s jumping and it's virtually crossing between squares
to get to the other squares. That, as a notion of space, is
beautiful. Because a board is a very bi-dimensional field,
black and white. And all the other pieces, they move diagonal,
up and down, et cetera. But when you conceive of the piece
that is jumping between squares—it’s a very beautiful
notion.
This is thinking in the game as a landscape, a micro-landscape.
And you know again chess is a product of a culture that has
a notion of nature. Those notions of nature—in terms of
how it works, how it’s controlled—are expressed in
the games that people invent in their time. And that civilization
that invented chess, it has a very precise notion of landscape
nature and control and production and production of the space
and production of a country. It’s a battle but it’s
also a science.
I play a lot and I wanted to make a chess game that was about
the knight—the horse—and then I multiply it by four.
They’re all horses so there are no queens and kings,
towers and bishops, just horses. And they’re running
endlessly because they are all together running in this open
field. You have a game that I didn’t put any rules. If
you want you can invent a game in which the horse eats another
horse and then somebody wins, but it’s very boring to
see horses eating each other. So I suppose nobody is going
to invent that game. How the colors in the board are placed
and multiplied by four is the logic of the game itself. It’s
transforming into something else but it’s still a game.
ART:21:
Does this piece in any way have
a reference to Marcel Duchamp—who was an expert chess
player?
OROZCO:
Not really. I don’t think
it has a reference to Duchamp. I think it has reference to
chess. It’s stronger—the reference to chess and
to landscape and to my own work—in terms of playing with
reality as a board. Like "Crazy Tourist," like "Island
to an Island." In terms of the scale,
landscape, and the construction of reality to make it that
field of perception. And I think it’s connected with
reality, but reality in terms of culture.
When we speak of reality it’s not nature. It’s not
like a concrete outside. It’s always talking about cultures
and specific objects. It’s not like metal is natural
thing or stone is a natural thing. Stone is so charged with
culture that we cannot claim that there is such a thing as
a pure stone or metal or clay or water. I think for water
and all the elements it depends on the culture they are in.
They have a cultural charge and for me to use a chessboard
or a stone, it’s the same. It has the same cultural charge.
It depends on the culture that you are working in. So to claim
that there is a thing, a pure thing call iron, it’s not
true. Iron means a lot of things and the artist who is using
iron, he’s aware of what it means to use iron, to use
marble, to use diamonds. Because those materials, they have
this meaning and they have this charge. It's the same if the
material is a little bit more physically elaborate like a
chess board. But in terms of culture and in terms of meaning,
they have the same complexity and specificity.
When I’m using a chessboard as the work, I am aware of
the complexity and the specificity of this game. But it’s
interesting when—if I will be using stone or marble—I
don’t think people will say, "Oh, he’s influenced
by Michelangelo." And when I use a chessboard they think
of Duchamp, but it’s a bit ridiculous because the marble
and the chessboard, culturally, they are as complex, as charged.
They have so many meanings that to claim that connection can
be very superficial at the end. If I use an orange or a billiard
table, both are complex and they are cultural and they are
social and they have meanings and it depends on the context
and depends in my connection with that. So I think my influence
is more in connection with everyday cultural objects that
I am encountering and that are part of my life.
